badly, as exposition--is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It is
a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked
and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It's
two different ways of looking at the whole affair," he repeated, pushing
open the gate. "And they are irreconcilable!" he added, with a sigh.
We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half way to the door,
he stopped, and said to me, "If you are going into this kind of
thing, there's a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you
some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of
literature!" I looked up at the charming house, with its genial color
and crookedness, and I answered, with a smile, that those evil passions
might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there.
"Oh, it doesn't matter, after all," he said, laughing; which I was glad
to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having excited him.

If I had, his excitement soon passed off, for at lunch he was
delightful; strangely delightful, considering that the difference
between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He
had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural kindliness, of
reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs.
Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good
grace. I watched her, at table, for further illustrations of that fixed
idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for, in the light of the
united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband, she had come to
seem to me a very singular personage. I am obliged to say that the signs
of a fanatical temperament were not more striking in my hostess
than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible
conformity, her tapering, monosyllabic correctness, began to appear to
be themselves a cold, thin flame. Certainly, at first, she looked like a
woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all,
it would be that of Philistinism. She might have been--for there are
guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles--the angel of
propriety. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply
perceived that she was an angel, without asking himself of what He had
been quite right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for
the reason why he should have married her, I saw, more than before, that
she was, physically speak